PostFinance E-Trading vs Trade Republic — which broker is better?

Pros

• PostFinance Ltd holds a Swiss banking licence, is wholly owned by Swiss Post and has been designated a systemically important bank by FINMA — an unusually strong counterparty for a retail brokerage account
• CHF 18 of trading credits every quarter exactly offsets the CHF 18 quarterly custody fee, so a lightly traded account pays no ongoing platform cost
• Brokerage starts at CHF 6 for SIX orders up to CHF 500, which is competitive for genuinely small tickets and savings-plan style investing
• Access to more than 20 venues including SIX, BX Swiss, Xetra, Frankfurt, Euronext Paris/Amsterdam/Brussels, Borsa Italiana, Madrid, Vienna, Nasdaq OMX, the LSE, NYSE, NASDAQ and Toronto
• Fully integrated with e-finance and the PostFinance App: instant funding from your everyday account, one login, automatic Swiss tax statement and withholding-tax documentation
• Over 20 cryptocurrencies with Swiss custody at 0.95% trading fee and a 0.15% annual portfolio fee, plus ETH staking — unusual for a mainstream retail bank
• ETF and equity savings plans from CHF 1 per execution with fractional trading, at 1% per execution
• Four-language support with a dedicated e-trading order desk open until 10 p.m. Swiss time on weekdays

Cons

• Mid-size orders are expensive: CHF 30 on a CHF 10,000 SIX order is 0.30%, and USD 35 on a USD 10,000 US order is 0.35% — several times what specialist brokers charge for the same execution
• The currency conversion cost is not disclosed as a percentage anywhere in the published price list, which makes the true cost of buying US or euro-denominated securities impossible to calculate in advance
• No options, no futures, no forex, no CFDs and no margin: the product range stops at shares, ETFs, funds, bonds, structured products, warrants and crypto
• The trading interface is an e-banking module, not a trading platform — no depth of book, no advanced order types, no serious charting and no API
• Debit interest on the e-trading account runs at 9.50% per year while credit interest is zero, so an accidental overdraft is punitive
• Effectively Swiss-residents-only, with no demo account and no way to evaluate the platform before opening a banking relationship

Pros

• Flat EUR 1.00 external settlement cost per order with no percentage, no minimum and no maximum - a EUR 50,000 trade costs the same as a EUR 50 one.
• Savings plans in stocks, ETFs, bonds and crypto execute at EUR 0 from EUR 1 per instalment, with fractional shares across roughly 4,900 assets.
• Full ECB banking licence held directly since December 2023, with cash covered to EUR 100,000 by the German statutory deposit guarantee.
• Interest paid on uninvested cash - 2.5% p.a. in Germany and around 3% p.a. in several other markets - instead of the zero most brokers pay.
• One app carries the securities account, a personal German IBAN, a Visa debit card and Saveback of up to 1% of card spend, capped at EUR 15 per month.
• Around 500 bonds tradable in small denominations, giving retail investors direct access to a market that usually starts at EUR 100,000 tickets.
• German residents get Abgeltungsteuer withheld and remitted automatically, so no capital gains filing is required.
• Transferring securities out to another broker costs nothing, so a portfolio built here is not locked in by exit fees.

Cons

• Since the EU banned payment for order flow in June 2026, the default 'Best Price' route fills against Trade Republic's own book - it sets the price it profits from, and publishes no spread data.
• Customer support is started from inside the app - by phone or live chat, 24 hours a day, according to Trade Republic - and there are no branches to walk into; stalled transfers and locked accounts are the dominant complaint in a Trustpilot score of roughly 3.3.
• FX cost on US shares is embedded in the quoted euro price on the default route rather than itemised, and a Direct Price order to Nasdaq or NYSE is converted at execution with no disclosed markup, so the real cost of a foreign-currency trade cannot be verified from Trade Republic's documents.
• No options, no futures, no mutual funds and no direct exchange access on the default route - the product range stops well short of a full-service broker.
• The price list we could obtain is the April 2023 edition; the current version is only reachable inside the app, so any fee you read elsewhere should be checked against the schedule in your own account.
• Tax is handled at source for German residents only; investors in the other 17 markets file everything themselves.